SMART (Start Making A Reader Today), Oregon’s statewide non-profit literacy
program, recently hired Linda Collier ’99 as its new marketing manager. In her
newly created position, Collier will develop and manage statewide marketing communications
campaigns for SMART, as well as implement volunteer and donor relations
programs for the highly successful reading program.

Linda served on the University’s National Alumni Board and
is the public relations manager for two non-profit organizations: Women in
Technology International, and The Learning for Life Technology Awards. She also
volunteers for the Oregon Humane Society. Collier holds a bachelor’s degree in
early education and her experience includes coaching the Pilot women’s basketball
team and working as the senior women’s administrator for the University’s
athletic department. She joined fellow former NAB members Stan Bozich ’53 and Bill
Ricks ’72 in helping SMART make reading a part of young students’ lives.

SMART brings thousands of Oregonians together to transform
the futures of children through reading. SMART is a cost-effective, non-profit
statewide literacy program that gives Oregon
children the extra reading support, new books, and caring one-on-one attention
they need. Since 1992, SMART volunteers have provided nearly 1.8 million hours
of service to more than 77,000 Oregon
children, and have given away nearly 1.2 million books.

In May of 2002, Joe Driscoll ’01 had a decision to make: the
former Academic All-American could trade in his spikes and racing singlet for
wing tips and a suit, or he could venture out into the post-collegiate world as
a professional runner. There was really no question as to what avenue the
three-time Pilot All-American would follow. The dilemma was in the
details—professional opportunities for distance runners are limited and
anything but lucrative. Opportunities to train and race for a living are often
indefinite and elusive.

For Driscoll that elusive opportunity presented itself in
the Zap Fitness Centerlocated near the Smoky Mountains
in Boone, N.C.
After hearing about Zap through word-of-mouth, Driscoll looked up the
non-profit running center and contacted head coach Pete
Rea and owner Zika Palmer.

“They said that a weekend visit was absolutely necessary,”
Driscoll says. “So I came out to Boone, it seemed perfect for training, and I
moved out here about a month later.” Elite runners work at the center on top of
their daily training regimens since Zap Fitness is funded entirely by private
donations and summertime camps and clinics. Aspiring runners agree, however,
that working at Zap beats the alternative of trying to balance a 40-hour
workweek with 110-130 miles of running per week.

Driscoll’s development in his two years in North Carolina has been notable. He has
already shaved 10 seconds off of his 5,000 meter run collegiate personal best
from 13 minutes and 58 seconds to 13:48.39 this past spring. Although a heel
injury limited Driscoll’s track season and prevented him from competing in the
2004 Athens Olympic Trials, the Portland
10,000 meter run record holder remains patient with his progress. “I’d like to
have a big breakthrough this fall or next year and really burst onto the
national scene,” Driscoll says now. “But if it takes a few years of slowly
chipping away at my times and training to become one of the best, then I am
willing to do that too."

Habari zenu is our friendly Kiswahili greeting here in Bukoba, Tanzania.
I teach 9th and 12th grades. Bukoba is on the western shore
of Lake Victoria, the second-biggest
lake in the world (after Lake Superior). It’s
about the size of Oregon.
Bananas and coffee are the main commodities grown here, and most people are
farmers. The average Tanzanian makes about $250 a year.

IhungoSchool has about 600
students, 500 of whom are boarders, and nearly all are boys, ages 18 to 25. The
average class size is about 40 students, of whom half have desks. Many students
sit two or three to a desk. There are hardly any books. The school has sporadic
electricity and no running water. My students walk half a mile to obtain water
for cooking, drinking, and cleaning. All water must be boiled first as there is
no potable water in Tanzania.

As a Peace Corps volunteer, I teach personal hygiene, plant
and animal anatomy and physiology and ecology, evolution and genetics. Because
we have few books I write a lot of notes on the chalkboard. I teach in English
and Kiswahili, and most students also speak a tribal language, such as Kittaya
here. Because 25% of the people here in Bukoba are HIV-positive, we also spend
a lot of time talking about AIDS and HIV, in a relentless effort to stop the
spread of this epidemic.

After the Peace Corps I’d like to travel through Africa and then earn a degree in international public
health — to see what I can do to battle savage health problems like the ones
here.

One day in 1976 a tiny nun walked past the sprawling
concrete Lane County Jail in Eugene,
Oregon. She stared at the
building. She wondered what the prisoners did and thought all day. So she found
out. She inquired about volunteering. She toured the jail. She asked the women
inmates what they wanted.

“Anything to relieve the boredom,” they replied.

So began the journey of Holy Names Sister Margaret Graziano
’61 into the lives of men and women we generally choose to forget — thieves,
rapists, murderers. She started as an art teacher, and over the years wore many
hats at the jail — volunteer coordinator, chaplain, alcohol and drug counselor
— but the essence of her work has never changed. She teaches prisoners to draw,
she listens to those who turned a deaf ear to the pleas of their victims, she
comforts inmates who showed no mercy in their crimes.

Only once did she feel fear, she says: after her first night
teaching inmates to draw. She went home and wondered what those jailed hands
had done, what crimes had they committed?

“But I knew if I thought that way I would never go back,”
she says, and she went back.

Now she is, as Eugene
police captain Ben Sunderland once said, the safest person in the jail, so
beloved that inmates would rush to her aid if trouble arose.

Today the Lane County Jail, like most American jails, is so
overcrowded that there is no official room for Graziano’s art classes. But she
keeps working with inmates who want her help. Anyone who wants to draw is
instantly issued ten sheets of paper, a pencil, and Graziano’s laser attention.
Her students have created calendars, exhibited work in shows, published work as
greeting cards, done the sort of startling and riveting and honest work like
the painting above. “Good things do come out of bad people,” she observes
quietly. “I try to treat prisoners with respect and dignity, to be there to
help them. No art is a failure, if there is a genuine attempt. There is
something good in everything.”

Annie Mason ’87 has taught first and second grades at St. John the Apostle School in Oregon City
for 14 years.

“Miss Mason’s” room is home to 28 children ages 6 and 7, and
here they learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. But being a teacher is more
than a classroom. It is being a back-up mom and friend and counselor and nurse.
It is constant commotion and noise and lunch tickets and kids in motley lines.
It is chaos and interruptions and keeping track of students leaving the
classroom. It is endless paperwork and prep work and organization and
creativity. It is post-graduate classes on weekends and in summers, and correcting
papers at coffee shops after school and in front of the television at night. It
is talking to parents and specialists and administrators and students. It is
writing ornate report cards and holding parent conferences. It is energy and
variety and giving out stickers and writing on the board. It is reading to
children on the rug with little, vulnerable, sweet, innocent, anxious eyes
permeating and admiring you, and you admiring them right back, and telling them
you love them too.

It is teaching children that “God is an integral part of
life and education,” as Mason says. “I teach prayer. When we hear a fire truck
or police car during school, we’ll say a prayer. That’s one of the ways kids
learn. I enjoy teaching: it’s forming souls and enlightening minds. It’s
affecting lives for an eternity, as Henry Adams wrote.”

Portland citizen Jean
Mitchell, who received her gerontology certificate from the University of Portland
in 1984, has been dedicated to improving the lives of seniors for more than two
decades. From rallying volunteers to support senior causes and helping establish
Elders in Action as a private, non-profit organization, to advising Portland officials on
senior-related issues, Mitchell has made a positive difference and contributed
to senior causes for over 20 years.

After earning her gerontology certificate, Mitchell was
introduced to Elders in Action as an intern in 1983. She became a volunteer for
the organization, helping recruit, screen, and support volunteers while serving
on the recruitment and screening committee for the Long Term Care Ombudsman program
in Multnomah County. In that role, Mitchell
interviewed and advised nearly 1,000 volunteer candidates who were interested
in advocating for residents of local elder care facilities.

Mitchell also has been a member of the Portland/ Multnomah Commission on Aging,
which provides advice to local government and has served on the commission’s
continuum of care committee. She was a charter member of Elders in Action’s
board of directors, helping establish it as a private, non-profit organization.
Additionally, she has served as a member of the Senior Law Project Advisory
Committee, which provides legal assistance to low-income elders. She is this
year’s recipient of Elders in Action’s Timeless Treasure award, which is
bestowed on one outstanding citizen each year who has made a fundamental
difference and a major commitment to helping and enhancing the lives of local
seniors.

“Jean is one of those people who simply inspire,” said Becky
Wherli, executive director of Elders in Action. “Her dedication is tireless. It
just shows the power that one person can have when it comes to making their
community a better place to live.”

In fall of 2003, Lisa Ripps ’95, a critical care nurse at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland, traveled with a Northwest Medical Teams group to Kurdish-populated Northern Iraq. There she spent several weeks caring for
sick and injured Iraqi civilians and teaching local medical personnel valuable
lessons in modern medical practices. The team went for days without sleep as
they flew to Washington D.C.,
Germany, Turkey, and finally drove by truck to Iraq. Along the
way, porters lost their medicine-filled bags; local drivers stranded them; heavily armed guards detained them. They finally caught some sleep in the city
of Erbil, so exhausted that Ripps and her colleagues slept though a bombing near their
hotel.

They moved on to the city of Dohuk,
where they found Azadi General Hospital.

Simple hygiene
and medical procedures became the priority as Ripps and the rest of her team
began their work. Lisa’s goal was to sharpen the nursing skills of nurses and
junior doctors who originally trained with outdated textbooks. What struck
Ripps the most was how little respect Kurdish nurses received; patients would
insist that doctors do even the most basic tasks. She also saw many young women
hospitalized with terrible, often fatal burns — burns which were self-inflicted
in suicide attempts when young brides felt hopelessly trapped as second-class
citizens. She came to the realization, “I can’t change this, it’s a major
social problem. All I can do is train these people (her group of nurses) and
empower them to empower other women.”

“I appreciate more deeply than ever that people are people
no matter where they live or what language they speak,” she says now. It’s a
lesson that may make the world a little more peaceful because of the adventures
of one nurse.

Christopher Seigneur graduated from the University in 1983
with a degree in mechanical engineering and a dream of traveling across America in a
red convertible for five weeks. “I was up front about the trip when I was
interviewing for jobs,” he says, and only one company told him to pop back in
when he finished wandering: Oregon Cutting Systems, which makes equipment for
chain saws. Seigneur’s been working for Oregon Cutting ever since, is now a
product design engineer, and has earned seven patents for his work. “Engineers
are in relentless pursuit of more efficient function,” he says. “Invention
begins with frustration, with the muttering of ‘there’s got to be a better
way.’ You ask a lot of questions, you pull your blinders off, look beyond the
normal, start to invent. You kind of go into a spiral, it seems to me, where
sometimes one solution will beg another question. The questions are the keys.
If you concentrate only on solutions you’ll be blinded by your own
expectations.”

Lest this all sound like Zen muck, Seigneur is cheerfully
honest about the cost of inventiveness: “You’re always breaking things. But
that’s how you push the limits. And get patents. And, most of all, happy
customers.”

Mike Williamson, who earned his degree in marketing from the
University in 1997, is head coach of the Portland Winter Hawks of the Western
Hockey League, a branch of the Canadian Hockey League. He is the youngest coach
in the 55-team CHL, in which players are 16 to 20 years old.

Hacking, slamming, spinning, bumping, colliding, skidding,
sliding, gliding, smashing, soaring, roughing, slashing, spearing, tripping,
scoring: these are the words of the ancient icy sport of hockey. Mike
Williamson, who started playing the game at age eight in his native Alberta, adds a few of
his own: “unpredictable, fast, exciting, finesse, aggressive — but I don’t
think it’s violent. Hockey’s a rough sport — physical, fast, emotional. It’s
not exactly a non-contact sport. Body-checking [hitting a guy carrying a puck]
is kind of an art form.”

Williamson played for the Hawks from 1991 to 1994, and then
served as assistant coach from 1994 until he took the top job in February of
2000. At first he missed the camaraderie among the players, and the rush of
playing the game. But now he notes that the biggest player on his team (Josh
Olson) is football-sized (6'5" and 230 pounds), and the smallest (Brad
Priestlay), at 5'9" and 165 pounds, is perhaps the most aggressive. Excellent
time to be a coach.